[Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 191 (Thursday, December 8, 2022)]
[Senate]
[Pages S7045-S7046]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



       National Defense Authorization Act and Government Funding

  Mr. President, on another matter, yesterday, I explained a simple and 
obvious reality that will determine whether the NDAA and government 
funding legislation succeeds or fails. Here is the simple fact: 
Protecting America and supporting our troops is not some partisan 
Republican priority that we will cajole and reward Democrats into 
accepting. Providing for the common defense is a basic, minimum 
responsibility of those of us in government. Passing a Defense 
authorization bill and appropriating the money our military needs are 
not rightwing demands that Democrats get unrelated goodies for going 
along with. The Commander in Chief's own party does not get to take our 
troops hostage for unrelated policy aims. Democrats will not be getting 
special rewards for simply doing their job.
  Yesterday, I praised the bipartisan deal that our Senate and House 
Armed Services Committees have struck on the NDAA. The House was 
supposed to advance the bill yesterday, but instead the Democratic 
majority fell into disarray.
  Some Democrats want to scuttle the Defense bill by attaching 
unrelated liberal demands that would guarantee its collapse. Attaching 
partisan non sequiturs to this carefully negotiated NDAA would achieve 
one and only one outcome: It would ensure that neither the NDAA nor 
their wish list would become law. The only outcome that partisan game-
playing would produce is the collapse of this bill--a massive injury 
for the U.S. Armed Forces at the hands of President Biden's party on 
President Biden's watch.

  The House needs to send us the agreed-upon bipartisan NDAA and do so 
without delay.
  The same reality applies to appropriations. Democrats just spent 2 
years using the partisan reconciliation process to lavish trillions of 
extra dollars on liberal domestic demands while our Armed Forces were 
languishing on the back burner. The Biden administration printed and 
spent trillions on things like welfare and solar panels like there was 
no tomorrow, but they couldn't even assemble a budget proposal that 
sufficiently funded our troops.
  So my friends across the aisle have zero standing to demand actually 
even

[[Page S7046]]

more--at this point, even more--liberal domestic spending in exchange 
for giving our Armed Forces what they actually need. Our Commander in 
Chief and his party have spent huge sums on domestic priorities outside 
the normal appropriations process without a penny for the Defense 
Department. Obviously, we won't allow them to now hijack the government 
funding process as well and take our troops hostage for even more 
spending.
  Protecting America is our job. Republicans will not be bribing our 
Democratic colleagues with special treats, as if they need to be 
bargained into defending America. The sooner the Democrats fully accept 
this reality, the sooner we can get on with the people's business. That 
goes for both the NDAA and the government funding as well.